Merging Netstumbler Log Files

Overview

If you consider wardriving fun-but only fun, a sort of cruisin' for the oughties-then this chapter won't interest you much. The scavenger hunt feel of wardriving is often enough. But as I mentioned in the previous chapter, wardriving tells you something about the state of wireless networking, first in your own community, and then (if you connect to the larger community of wardrivers nationally and even globally) in the world at large. Over the year that I've been wardriving, I've watched the number of access points grow rapidly along my 'standard wardrives' in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, and tracked the proportion of 'clueless' Wi-Fi users: those who leave the default SSID in place and fail to enable WEP security. (Conclusion: It's appallingly high!)

I've seen reports from elsewhere in the country indicating that where wardriving has gotten TV coverage, suddenly the percentage of people enabling WEP jumps by 10 or 15 percentage points. So let it not be said that wardriving is 'hacking' or, God help us, terrorism. At the very least, it's technology market intelligence. At best, it's a reality check for network security, and encouragement to use the security features that Wi-Fi offers.

To make the best use of the intelligence that wardriving gathers about wireless networking, you're going to have to become familiar with NetStumbler's log files. The data gathered by NetStumbler is fairly sophisticated technically, and in this chapter I'll explain how to generate the text files you'll need to analyze the data, and how to interpret the data in the files. Toward the end of this chapter, I'll also show you how to generate maps on which stumbled stations are plotted, using the free Stumbverter utility.